Three reasons why TrafficGuard rocks

The ad fraud prevention landscape is saturated with legacy vendors claiming they’re up to the task of protecting thousands of dollars worth of ad budget; but more often than not they lack the technology and expertise to back this up.

In a field full of phonies, VIPs (that’s very-important-PPC managers) must only work with vendors with the proven ability to safeguard enterprise budgets and deploy intelligent prevention solutions. As luck would have it, TrafficGuard does just that.

For a detailed look at the ad protection market and its key players you can download our comparison guide. But if you’re busy/bored/can’t be bothered to read more than one page, here are three reasons why TrafficGuard rocks.
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"Overtime, ad fraud has become more sophisticated, with some invalid activity on the surface appearing similar to human activity."
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‍- Raigon Jolly, Head of Analytics and Data Science at TrafficGuard

Number one: We offer unparalleled real-time analytics and transparency.

Like all the best campaign managers, we bet you start every new campaign by analysing the data and results of the previous one. Who wouldn’t? Invaluable information about your customers’ hopes and dreams (okay, buying habits) lies within the data from your previous campaigns.

So it may come as a surprise that some vendors fail to provide their users with adequate information on the traffic they audit. A number of our competitors fail to provide the minimum standard of campaign insight, such as providing the reasons why traffic was invalidated or allowing users to export information for their own analysis and reporting. For a tool whose primary aim is to improve transparency, why so cagey?

We believe that these insights hold the key to your next quarter’s campaign success. That’s why the TrafficGuard platform does everything within its power to give users actionable insights. We offer clear and indisputable reasons for each invalidated transaction, and show you the performance of every campaign, ad group, creative, and keyword you run —arming you with an arsenal of actionable insights you can take forward into your next campaign.

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Number two: We analyse and protect traffic at every stage of the funnel.

Marketing is full of funnels, so they must be important. Representative of the journey a user takes when engaging with your business, funnels demonstrate potential sticking points of their journey, as well as the junctions intelligent fraudsters can use to fool advertisers into believing they have genuine intent.

TrafficGuard analyses and protects your traffic at every stage of the funnel, that includes;

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Pre-bid exclusions

We stop your campaigns bidding on placements that are non-viewable or invalid. Our pre-bid optimisation uses intelligence gathered from the whole advertising journey to prioritise audiences with the highest likelihood to convert. In essence, TrafficGuard has learned how to handpick the best prospects to display your ads to, maximising your budget and doing wonders for your conversion rate. Clever, right?

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In stream prevention

Once your ad is clicked, TrafficGuard will corroborate with the impression that drove it and enrich that data with intelligence from our proprietary Reputation IQ database to provide real-time validation. Invalid impressions and clicks are never passed to attribution solutions, reducing the chance for misattribution. Big words, but what does that mean for your ad budget? It’s an extra line of defence against any potential IVT which made it through the initial exclusion, and another drawbridge pulled up against the threat of fraudsters.

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Attribution verification

If all that isn’t enough, TrafficGuard also verifies attribution in real-time. Vendors who fail to provide this run the risk of setting off the ‘misattribution snowball’, the effect that occurs when a single conversion attributed to the wrong source inflates the value of that channel not just by one conversion, but every subsequent event made by that user.

This leads marketers to underinvest in the channels that deliver the best results, restricting their advertising ROI. Measurement and attribution solutions have varying capabilities to prevent misattribution. Often, verification takes place after the attribution has been made, which sends misleading signals to traffic sources and media managers.

Boasting aside, we truly believe in the capabilities and power of the TrafficGuard platform. We’re obsessed with the quality of our clients’ campaigns, driven by superhero-worthy hatred of the click fraud villains who undermine the efforts (and budgets) of hard-working campaign managers. Our crack team, mostly made up of data scientists and ML engineers, know that no amount of marketing can disguise a product that is fundamentally not fit for purpose—so they’re genuinely proud of our intelligent solution.

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Number three: Machine learning technology is baked into our platform.

AI/ML is a buzz term for good reason—it’s really, really cool. Up against some incredibly intelligent bad actors, only vendors with a company-wide commitment to the effective use of AI/ML processes can fully tackle the issue.

Here at TrafficGuard, we use machine learning algorithms to detect and block shape-shifting invalid traffic and ad fraud attempts. Even the most rudimentary fraud tactics can circumvent the rules put in place by legacy vendors, making AI/ML processes not only desirable, but completely necessary for adequate campaign protection.

Many vendors who offer PPC campaign protection rely solely on tools like rules engines and IP blacklists to detect it, but this raises two key limitations. First, these tools only look for known indicators of ad fraud, so are not suitable for detecting new fraud tactics as they evolve. Second, they risk flagging valid impressions, clicks, or install events as fraudulent. These false positives can result in valid traffic being removed, legitimate sources not receiving due payment, and advertising campaigns’ effectiveness compromised. Not good.

Our data wizards have built AI/ML models which analyse combinations of indicators over time and across devices to detect fraud as it evolves as well as mitigate false positives. When used alongside rules engines and blacklists, TrafficGuard’s models provide far greater protection against both known and unknown forms of ad fraud.

If you’d like to learn more about the TrafficGuard platform, you can visit our resources page. For questions on the platform, enquiries for sales, or to chat about the weather, feel free to contact us.

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